Who are the ladies within the Marxist Labor Week picture, which laid the inspiration for the Frankfurt School? The literature often means that they had been linked to males and their function was secondary, however no. They had been seven ladies with mental coaching, politically lively and who, like Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno or Herbert Marcuse, had been a part of the Institute for Social Research (IfS), cradle of the Frankfurt School, a motion that was born within the Nineteen Twenties with important concepts about society, tradition and politics. It was the actress Hede Massing; the pedagogue and thinker Hedda Korsch; Gertrud Alexander, journalist, politician and artwork critic; Rose Wittfogel, graduate librarian; Käthe Weil, pedagogue; Christiane Sorge, economist; and the feminist and thinker Margarete Lissauer.
Their biographies have been recovered in an article by researcher Judy Slivi included within the ebook In the shadows of custom (Eternal Cadence). The new quantity, printed on the event of the centenary of the legendary IfS, brings collectively texts by Christina Engelmann, Lena Reichardt, Bea S. Ricke, Sarah Speck and Stephan Voswinkel through which a beforehand unpublished historic evaluation is made.
Sarah Speck, present deputy director of the IfS, speaks in a video name in regards to the findings of the analysis course of collected on this publication: “We all know that the history of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research is a male history. I think that with this book we really change this perspective.” The search was not straightforward. Their names had been troublesome to search out via conventional means. “But there is other type of material such as letters, gossip, interviews, oral history,” he factors out.
The Argentine political scientist and thinker Verónica Gago ready the prologue. “The first thing I wanted to note is that there were many women at the Frankfurt School, but they always appeared under the labels of wives, assistants, librarians, stenographers, secretaries.” The first gesture of the ebook, he says, is to acknowledge them of their particular contributions, of their theoretical practices and in a collaborative work methodology. For Gago this was “the kitchen of research”: every part that must be achieved, understood and ready for the ultimate product.
Trade unionist, Jewish and socialist
Käthe Leichter (1895-1942) was born right into a bourgeois Jewish household in Vienna. She studied Political Science and entered political life within the employees’ and girls’s councils on the finish of the First World War. His relationship with the Institute dates again to its origins. In her memoirs she recounted her friendship with Carl Grünberg, the primary director of the establishment, and claims that it was she who proposed him to the founders for the place. She was invited to Frankfurt, though she most well-liked to remain in Vienna the place in 1925 she started to arrange the ladies’s part of the Chamber of Workers. It was there that she established a hyperlink between the manufacturing of feminist and socialist information, outcomes that had been mirrored in publications comparable to The ebook of girls’s work in Austria (1930) o This is how we dwell… 1,320 industrial employees report about their lives (1932).
With one foot within the factories and the opposite within the era of data, “the debates of the feminist and labor movements were reflected in the problems addressed in the research and, conversely, the results of academic studies had to be useful for politics,” Duma says. One of his principal works was Studies on authority and householda collective undertaking of the IfS the place Leichter developed questionnaires and wrote the primary outcomes. In the ultimate textual content, printed by Horkheimer, the creator is simply talked about within the physique of textual content within the chapters.
In 1937 her collaboration with the IfS ended when the advance of Nazism was already too harmful for a girl like her. When many had been already in exile, she remained in Austria and, after being a part of the resistance, was arrested. Some survivors who shared confinement along with her within the Ravensbrück focus camp assured that, even in confinement, she continued along with her political and investigative work. Leichter was murdered between late 1941 and early 1942 on the Bernburg Sanatorium and Mental Health Center.
Multitasking researchers
Horkheimer, Adorno, Habermas… “Three or five geniuses who sometimes sat down with cigarettes and whiskey and talked about their philosophical ideas,” Speck portrays. “It is not about taking away merit from his work,” clarifies Gago, who doesn’t deny that his works are spectacular. However, she criticizes “the construction of an androcentric history, which cuts out those male figures and leaves those who made it possible for these geniuses to write, think, research and publish in the shadows and as subordinates.”
They, nonetheless, had been what right now could be referred to as multitasking. Gago highlights that these ladies “combined empirical work, theoretical reflection, political agitation and militancy.” Consider that they had been disobedient. “There was a disconnect in the 1960s between the best-known figures of the IfS (the men) and the social movements.” It is now identified, via the work of a few of the researchers, that they did have hyperlinks with the feminist teams of that point.
Speck talks about three researchers who handed via the IfS and, after leaving, had been a part of the vanguard of gender concept: Mirra Komarovsky, Helge Pross and Regina Becker-Schmidt. Verónica Gago provides: “Some searches that have to do with the feminist and materialist perspective were left aside, which today are being recovered and updated.”
In Spain the ebook has generated expectation. “If there is no periphery, the center would not exist. Without all the work in the shadows, there would have been no tradition as such,” says Lorena Acosta, professor within the Philosophy part of the University of La Laguna (Tenerife) who, collectively along with her colleague Chaxiraxi Escuela, develops a seminar on authors on the periphery of Critical Theory the place these unknown ladies match. Through a video name, the teachers have fun their college students’ curiosity in these new figures: “They did not know most of them. It is surprising how many of these figures have gone completely unnoticed and I believe that there will be that same enthusiasm with the translation of this book into Spanish,” says Escuela.
José Manuel Romero, professor within the Department of History and Philosophy on the University of Alcalá, believes that the analysis can have an essential influence on research on this present of thought. The tutorial assures that within the official and unofficial historiography of the Institute solely male figures stand out. “It is true that Horkheimer and Adorno carried out a criticism, which was intended to be radical, of modern society and of Western civilization itself, but they maintained habits inside and outside the academy that were more typical of bourgeois lords, and it seems that in the context of the Institute they tended to reproduce the patriarchal structures of the time.”
The new publication is a part of a broad wave of feminist revision past philosophy. At the Bauhaus the names of Anni Albers, Gunta Stölzl and Marianne Brandt emerged; Hilma af Klint in summary portray and Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo or Dorothea Tanning in surrealism. Science, literature and different disciplines are additionally working to convey to mild many ladies who, till right now, had been within the shadows of the mental historical past of the twentieth century.
https://elpais.com/cultura/2025-12-27/en-la-escuela-de-francfort-si-habia-mujeres-eran-feministas-militantes-e-investigadoras.html